Fascinating. A couple of hours either way rotationally.
1 Like
Timing. Placing. Do you detect a theme here. 
I think you are avoiding the question posed by the fine tuning argument.
1 Like
I question that.
Not in the slightest, no. Why would I? How could any rational person, including those of faith?
The theme that I have so subtly been proclaiming all this time and cleverly nuanced that I thought you might have picked up on by now is that God in his providence is sovereign over time and place, timing and placing.
Many of faith believe that (do you recall hearing of Maggie or George?), but most of us are not as rational as you, since you believe God is impotent to act interventionally.
There’s nothing clever or subtle in the thought of God committing geocide and micromanaging(=fine tuning) some arbitrary love child while watching others hang and burn. As in Arthur C. Clarke’s terribly beautiful short The Star.
Do straw men and red herrings come any bigger?
A Father caring for his children is micromanaging. Whatever.
Does irrelevance? Irrationality?
Speaking of relevance, I bet you didn’t see or didn’t read the Bonhoeffer I posted, or perceive it as applicable to you. Just in case, here it is again:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I read it. You should not let fiction determine your worldview.
To a nihilist, maybe.
On the question of whether things would turn out the same evolutionary, opinions reflect the opiner’s inclinations to determinism or indeterminism rather than conclusive evidence. Evolution has both some highly unpredictable aspects and some tightly constrained aspects. Another challenge is what do we mean by things coming out the same? For example, if a rewind of evolution produced somewhat human-like, spiritual beings descended from cephalopods, is that basically the same result or not? Simon Conway Morris emphasizes the similarities. Roger D. K. Thomas and students have done analyses showing that most of the imaginable body plans had been exploited by end of the Cambrian, suggesting that most of the options have been taken and another version of evolution would turn out broadly similar. Gould emphasized the variation of the Cambrian forms - arthropods show combinations of appendages in ways that are not found in any of the major arthropod groups present for the rest of the Phanerozoic (how many antennae, limbs, mouthparts, etc.) But the average non-biologist might easily dismiss them as a bunch of bugs and shrimp, whereas no one has trouble telling a butterfly from a standard beetle from an ant, which are all holometabolous insects. Which disparity is more impressive?
1 Like
Perhaps I have not been clear - fine tuning as it is discussed deals with events from a beginning, such as formation of stars, elements and subsequent events (molecules, planets etc). These are shown to be critically dependent on scientific calculations, and thus the use of the unfortunate ‘fine tuning’ phrase. The various discussions on biological evolution are relevant after the formation of stars, planets, molecules etc. and are thus not the basis for a repeat of the creation.
My point has been that if the conditions covered by ‘fine tuning’ differed, science shows that nothing would be as it is. Critics have brushed this aside by denying a beginning, denying scientific constants, and so on, without producing any substantial scientific data.
Discussions on evolution would be mute, since under different conditions, elements and molecules as we know, could not form.
Which conditions?
A detailed discussion and views for and against this notion can be found in places such as:
I’m fully conversant with the myth of fine tuning. Nature self tunes a few, a polydactylic handful of measured constants which cannot vary but will derive from the intersections of the prevenient laws nonetheless. If God is the ground of being, He still may not have to omm them.
I don’t know enough about universal cosmic constants that must be met. As far as I know , and I’ve definitely heard speculative science touch on it, is that this universe can be reshaped a lot.
If you are asking is things like matter and energy essential and would have to be he same. Most likely. As far as I know we don’t know of beings without being formed of matter and how would anything get done without energy. It’s difficult to imagine a universe without various temperatures. But I don’t see how any of that really works for fine tuning. It’s sort of like saying having eyes is proof of a creator bedside without them we could not see. But I’ll read through the encyclopedia you shared in a link. Though I’ll do it later. It’s 530 here and though
I’m awake if I was to try to read that I imagine sleep would come again lol.
So are you arguing that fine tuning can be interpreted as seeing necessary constants such as the development of matter, the development of energy and things like there was be temperatures would have to be the same and because it would have to be the same that implies it was fine tuned by a creator because if not, nothing would be here. It’s impossible
For us to live in a lightless, “energy-less” matter-less”‘space.
SkovandOfMitaze made a fair number of points that I would tend to agree with also.
However, I might back off on the fine-tuning a little. Look at it this way. Suppose we find a way to mix a bunch of chemicals together in a flask, shake it, and a fish comes out. Does it really mean we don’t need God?
Suppose further that we could show (somehow) that there were a multitude of combinations of the various constants that would render some sort of viable solution where intelligent life could form? Does that mean we don’t need God?
Would not such findings be even scarier because now, we really think we are God? Yet you know just as well as I do just how rotten we human beings can be without the holy spirit to still our impetuous mouths. Even the best of us, even those who really try to follow Jesus can screw up big time. We can rashly lose our temper, we can be petulant, we can judge people cruelly, we can think we know people when we really don’t. We believe in our technology. We’re hardly different from the people who built the tower of Babel. Our construction can even bring us close to the heavens than even in that time, and google translate is often sufficient these days that we can understand the garbled translations it generates.
It’s probably good if God makes it so we are too thick to figure out how life came about so we don’t become even more insufferably overflowing with hubris about the power of our technology as “the answer” to life truth and everything.
Look more to the reasons for faith. Isn’t faith about doing what is right even when it will cost you severely? Faith is about being confident in God in the times when you might lose your job, maybe ruin your hard-earned career because you listen to Jesus instead of listening to power and authority who have gone astray.
Consider this point from John 12:37-42
37 Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him, 38 so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:
“Lord, who has believed what he heard from us,
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”39 Therefore they could not believe. For again Isaiah said,
40 “He has blinded their eyes
and hardened their heart,
lest they see with their eyes,
and understand with their heart, and turn,
and I would heal them.”41 Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him. 42 Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; 43 for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.
Whereas generally, we read this passage to be about people rejecting Jesus because they worship the world, at that time, the “synagogue” was an essential part of a person’s life. Today, going to church is a choice and hardly something that demands a great sacrifice. The modern “synagogues” are the institutions that symbolize success in modern society. If you are fired from your job, or you lose an election, in many ways, this is the synagogue for us now. Like most sin, it starts with the little things and graduates. Eventually, if you resist the powerful in doing evil or say something that superiors don’t want to hear, and you can be thrown out of these modern “synagogues”.
Isn’t the real point that if we actually accept Jesus, we will do what is right – even if it costs us dearly. Our struggle is to learn to trust in God, not to revel in worldly blandishments or quarrel about things that none of us can really answer. We want to do what is right in the world.
It is there you should be looking for Jesus. Although fine-tuning and evolution are very challenging problems to understand, they are comparatively easy questions. Yet, if God used evolution, what can we say? If God made a “world” where all multiverses (if they exist) could have different constants and in every one of them, intelligent, sentient beings could evolve, I don’t think that tells us anything. It is living out a life of repentance that matters and fine-tuning and evolution (true or false) makes no difference to that. Following Jesus is a way to say that you desire to do what is truly right from that 30000 ft perspective of God’s eyes, not your own. [Maybe, in terms of scale, that should be the astronomical or multiverse perspective of God’s eyes.]
by grace we proceed
[minor edits to remove some repetitive sentences and grammatical errors.]
The essence of the fine tuning argument is that if the physical constants and physical makeup of the universe had been different at its beginning then we wouldn’t have the universe we see now. Tiny changes in those values would have made big differences.
The debate is about whether this fine balance of constants and matter/energy required a fine tuner, a conscious creator who could produce these conditions. That is something we don’t know at the moment.
The debate often turns into someone/deity fine tuning it all or not, and I think the terminology of ‘fine tuning’ is unfortunate.
My impression is that the debate is skewed into areas such as ID vs completely random events, with some disagreement on a beginning.
I do not accept a notion that God is a technician who tinkers with this or that to get things right. So two outlooks are reasonable. (a) we believe God is the Creator and science is a human activity that seeks to understand the creation, or (b) we do not believe there is a God and what we observe has come about by some incomprehensible event(s).
Ones outlook would thus be a reflection of (a) or (b). I cannot see how our understanding of science would differ. While there is a general agreement on (a), I get the impression that some think science provides evidence for (b). I think this (if indeed my impression is correct) is mistaken.
1 Like